On a Friday evening in late April, Cathy Tie, the Canadian serial entrepreneur and self-styled \u201cBiotech Barbie\u201d, is centre stage at New York City\u2019s famous Carnegie Hall, performing Saint-Saens\u2019 Piano Concerto No 2 on a gleaming Steinway grand piano, accompanied by an orchestra. Her floor-length pink tulle gown shimmers with gold sequins; her dark hair cascades in waves over her caped shoulders. The music is passionate, but Tie\u2019s expression is impassive. Her eyes dart between the piano keys and the sheet music in a flurry of concentration, but the rest of her face is totally still. She isn\u2019t lost in the music; she\u2019s focused on the job.<\/p>\n
After the last notes ring out, Tie stands up and breaks into a tight smile and a brief bow before walking off stage, only to immediately return to receive the slightly awkward Happy Birthday sung by everyone in the orchestra and auditorium. This is Tie\u2019s 30th birthday party. She has hired Carnegie Hall to mark the occasion. And, as I discover at the cocktail afterparty, most of the people invited to this performance \u2013 including me \u2013 have either only just met Tie or don\u2019t know her at all.<\/p>\n
Tie likes to make an impact in whatever she does \u2013 but she\u2019s a difficult person to pin down. Since the start of 2025, Tie has launched three separate biotech companies and lived in three different cities (Los Angeles, Toronto and New York). She tried to live in a fourth (Beijing), only to discover that she was banned from China \u2013 the country of her birth \u2013 while she was en route to begin a new life with her Chinese husband. This time a year ago, Tie had just married one of the most notorious scientists on the planet, the biophysicist He Jiankui, who served three years in prison<\/a> after he illegally created the world\u2019s first gene-edited babies.<\/p>\n Tie and He separated three months after their wedding. Last summer, Tie arrived in New York with little more than a suitcase and her shih-tzu, Charlie, to announce a new venture: a startup that will conduct the same kinds of procedures that had earned her ex the nickname \u201cChina\u2019s Dr Frankenstein\u201d. Tie wants to edit the genes of embryos \u2013 to alter the building blocks of human life \u2013 to prevent diseases including cystic fibrosis, Huntington\u2019s and hereditary cancers. Unlike He, she says she wants her work to be done openly and transparently, with the blessing of regulators \u2013 and powered by the rocket fuel of venture capital investment.<\/p>\n The hardest thing about genetically engineering a baby is getting permission to do it; the technical part is not particularly complicated. Ever since the Crispr-Cas9 gene editing tool was invented in 2012, so long as you know the sequence of DNA in a genome that you would like to change, you can seek it out, then alter or delete it. It\u2019s a bit like using the find, copy, cut and paste functions on a computer. You don\u2019t even need to be a very experienced molecular biologist to do it.<\/p>\n Tie performing at her 30th birthday party at Carnegie Hall in New York. Photograph: Trevor Tarnowski<\/p>\n If you edit the sequence of DNA of germline cells \u2013 the eggs, sperm and very early embryos that form the first stages of human reproduction \u2013 the changes you make will be reproduced in all the other cells of the human being ultimately created from those cells. And not just that particular human: every generation of their descendants will inherit those changes. Of all the possibilities presented in biotechnology, this is arguably the one with the highest stakes for humankind. That\u2019s why the use of germline gene editing for reproductive purposes (rather than research) is banned in the UK<\/a>, the US<\/a> and China<\/a>, and there is widespread international agreement that no research should be conducted on embryos that could grow to term and be born as babies.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is obviously the most consequential technology of our generation, because it fundamentally impacts and changes our understanding of what we can do with our species,\u201d Tie says when we first meet, three days before Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n Gene editing has the power to alter the trajectory of human evolution for ever; the direction it takes will depend on who wields the editing tools. \u201cThere is no public funding available for researchers in the space,\u201d Tie explains. \u201cEverything is privately funded.\u201d It\u2019s up to entrepreneurs to demonstrate the potential benefits for humankind, she says, so regulators may soften their hardline stance and allow them to rewrite human DNA.<\/p>\n For anything to change, there needs to be wider public acceptance of gene editing. With that in mind \u2013 and in the spirit of the openness she claims as her USP \u2013 Tie has invited me to join her in the run-up to her party as she takes on what she calls the \u201cfear dressed up as caution\u201d about her field. Her goal, she says, is to save humanity from the cruel tyranny of heritable diseases. But, as her birthday celebration demonstrates, Tie doesn\u2019t do things by halves. If she succeeds, what next?<\/p>\n Money is flowing into human genetic engineering. Since Tie arrived in New York last August, some of the richest men in the world have begun investing in her rivals. Gene editing startup Preventive<\/a> launched in October with the stated aim of \u201cpreventing disease before birth\u201d, and OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, along with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, are among its investors.<\/p>\n Seven months before Preventive\u2019s launch, Armstrong coined the term \u201cthe Gattaca stack\u201d \u2013 after the dystopian 1997 sci-fi film about a near-future society dominated by genetically engineered super-beings \u2013 in a post on X<\/a> describing technologies he says will be routinely used to create the babies of the future. Gene editing \u201cfor disease prevention, or enhancement\u201d was included in Armstrong\u2019s list. For him, at least, this is about improving babies, as well as avoiding disease.<\/p>\n Another item in Armstrong\u2019s Gattaca stack \u2013 preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), so you can \u201cchoose the embryo that best matches what you want\u201d \u2013 is already routinely used in the US. It\u2019s unremarkable enough that the PGT company Nucelus Genomics<\/a> advertises on the New York subway with the tagline \u201cHave your best baby\u201d, promising to maximise parents\u2019 chances of having a child that is taller and smarter as well as healthier. PGT is embryo selection \u2013 sorting and choosing, rather than editing \u2013 but over the past decade it has become a regular part of fertility treatment for many Americans. Eugenics might still be a dirty word in most circles but, in the US at least, it has become quietly acceptable to use whatever tools reproductive technology can provide to optimise future offspring.<\/p>\n Tie isn\u2019t fazed by her competition. \u201cI hope there is more funding from billionaires,\u201d she says, simply. She doesn\u2019t regard them as competitors anyway, as there is currently no market in which they can legally compete. \u201cI believe we\u2019re all working on the same goal, which is to show, transparently, what this research can do.\u201d<\/p>\n China, of course, has already demonstrated what gene editing can do. It was Chinese researchers who made the very first edits<\/a> to human embryos in 2015, and a Chinese scientist \u2013 Tie\u2019s former husband, He Jiankui \u2013 who implanted gene-edited embryos for the first time, creating twin girls known as Lulu and Nana, the first genetically modified human beings ever born.<\/p>\n double quotation markBiology can be used for good \u2013 or bad. Stopping this research will drive bad actors to do it in secret<\/p>\n He announced Lulu and Nana\u2019s birth in a presentation at a Hong Kong conference in 2018. He had edited their embryos with the intention of giving them immunity to HIV; the twins\u2019 father was HIV positive, and He was trying to introduce a gene mutation that would protect them from infection. But, according to his own data, he failed to do this; edits were made to the twins\u2019 genetic code, but not the ones he had intended, yet he still allowed the embryos to be implanted and brought to term. The furore after their birth earned He a 3m yuan fine (about \u00a3330,000), as well as three years in jail. As for Lulu and Nana, no one knows what happened to them: there is no available information on their health or wellbeing eight years on from He\u2019s experiment.<\/p>\n Since he was released from jail in 2022, China\u2019s Dr Frankenstein has emerged as an unlikely social media star, with close to 150,000 followers on X. His posts over the past year have been unrepentant, but also \u2013 intriguingly \u2013 uncensored by the Chinese government. \u201cSilicon Valley this and that \u2013 you are not the only country in the world that has investors,\u201d he wrote in August<\/a>, followed by, <\/a>\u201cDesigner babies, super smart or super good-looking, are inevitable.\u201d At the same time, China\u2019s biotechnology ambitions have rapidly expanded. On 12 September, premier Li Qiang announced new draft regulations<\/a> on biomedical technologies that emphasised \u201cthe need to promote innovative development\u201d and \u201caccelerate R&D and commercialization\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWelcome to the dawn of the biological arms race,\u201d Tie posted on X<\/a> in response to Li\u2019s announcement. \u201cThere\u2019s a big geopolitical component to this,\u201d she says. This is one of the reasons why she chose to call her first human gene-editing company the Manhattan Project \u2013 the same name as the programme that produced the atomic bomb in 1945. It was also known as Manhattan Genomics, but \u201cI like to call it Manhattan Project\u201d, Tie says. (She earned the nickname Biotech Barbie after she commissioned a promotional video<\/a> of herself in the style of the Barbie movie. \u201cBoth Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie came out at the same time in 2023,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt was Barbenheimer summer.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cTwo nuclei are essential for understanding the universe: the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell,\u201d Tie says. \u201cIn the 20th century, we understood the nucleus of the atom very well, and we learned some very difficult lessons via weapons and wars. I don\u2019t want to see the same happen with the second nucleus.\u201d It\u2019s a strange parallel to draw: the atomic bomb was responsible for at least 200,000 deaths, and many wish the research into the possibilities contained in the nucleus of the atom had never been undertaken.<\/p>\n \u201cBiology is a double-edged sword \u2013 it can be used for good, to heal people, or it can be used for bad,\u201d Tie continues. \u201cStopping this research will only drive bad actors to do it secretively. There is no way to stop this. This is inevitable. The only way to proceed is to do it openly and transparently.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite her declared commitment to openness,\u00a0much of Tie\u2019s work seems as shrouded in secrecy as the original Manhattan Project. She won\u2019t tell me how many people are working on her team or who they are (\u201cI\u2019m working with pioneers. I\u2019m unable to name them, unfortunately\u201d) or who has invested in her company (\u201cI\u2019m unable to disclose their names, but these are very motivated individuals and funds\u201d). She doesn\u2019t want me to reveal where her work is based, other than that it\u2019s in New York (it\u2019s not in Manhattan).<\/p>\n It is also no longer the Manhattan Project. By December, the gene-editing startup Tie launched last August had shut down. \u201cI made a fundamental mistake that a lot of early-stage startup founders do, which is choosing the wrong co-founder,\u201d she tells me. Eriona Hysolli was the former head of biological sciences at Colossal<\/a>, a company that uses biotechnology to try to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. Hysolli has said<\/a> she and Tie parted ways because of \u201ca Cayman-based entity\u201d founded by Tie \u201cwhich confounded the open and transparent mission\u201d. When I ask Tie to tell me more, her reply is terse: \u201cI don\u2019t want to talk too much about that.\u201d<\/p>\n But Tie is more than happy to speak at length about the mission of Origin Genomics, her current gene-editing startup. Its aim, she says, is to eliminate severe disorders caused by single gene mutations. \u201cIt\u2019s about preventative pre-birth care for the patients that are carriers of these well-known mutations. The goal of Origin Genomics is to help prevent suffering via the newest gene editors applied before birth.\u201d<\/p>\n Older gene editors \u2013 including the versions of Crispr-Cas9 used by He when he created Lulu and Nana, although Tie doesn\u2019t mention this specifically \u2013 were more prone to \u201coff-target\u201d effects, resulting in the wrong edits. \u201cThere are new advances in gene editing that make this process a lot safer than it was even five, eight, 10 years ago,\u201d Tie continues. \u201cWe sequence the cells before and after the genetic change to ensure that it is safe, and that no unintended genetic changes were made.\u201d In accordance with US federal law, none of the embryos Tie\u2019s company is working with at this stage are implanted, or allowed to grow older than 14 days\u2019 gestation.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is to prove to the world \u2013 the public, the scientific community, the regulators, the bioethicists \u2013 that this technology can be safe, if the data shows that it is, and that it should be considered for clinical use,\u201d she says. \u201cI would love to change the global norms of this. I think it\u2019s inevitable, and someone needs to do it right.\u201d (During our conversation in her office, Tie uses the word \u201cinevitable\u201d 12 times.)<\/p>\n double quotation markWe shouldn\u2019t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fixTie at her office in New York. Photograph: Caroll Taveras\/The Guardian<\/p>\n But there are other ways of treating the same conditions that don\u2019t result in genetic changes that will be passed on to every future generation. Gene therapies work on cells that aren\u2019t involved in reproduction. They are given to carriers of a genetic disease after the patient has been born, and they affect only some, not all, of the body\u2019s cells. Once researchers devise a way of delivering the gene therapy to the right cells, they can correct the relevant genetic mutations. Gene therapy is already being used to target a wide range of conditions, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), once the most common genetic cause of death among children under two years old.<\/p>\n Tie is unconvinced. \u201cMany of those therapies have failed in clinical trials,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is actually safest to explore this when a human is in its earliest stages of development, because you have fewer cells to deliver the genetic changes to.\u201d Gene therapies can be extremely expensive \u2013 Zolgensma, the gene therapy for SMA, had a list price of \u00a31.79m when it was approved on the NHS in 2021; the treatment for sickle cell, Casgevy, has a similar price. \u201cCasgevy is a three-to-six-month process. Patients have to go through chemotherapy and other really invasive procedures,\u201d Tie says. This isn\u2019t the case for all gene therapies, I point out; Zolgesma is given in a single dose, delivered over a few hours. Tie blinks. \u201cI\u2019m not too familiar with that example. The research I\u2019ve done shows gene therapy is quite invasive. And it\u2019s all relative. When you have an embryo that grows up without the mutation, that\u2019s a lot more ideal.\u201d<\/p>\n Why not screen embryos and implant those that don\u2019t carry these disorders, instead of editing those that do? Families often don\u2019t have the choice, Tie replies; sometimes all their embryos are affected. And, as we move further into an age when women are having children later in life, they are often less able to produce enough eggs to create a meaningful range of embryos to choose from. \u201cThat\u2019s why patients believe their embryos are very precious. And so do the IVF doctors,\u201d she says. \u201cNot to mention that it\u2019s extremely taxing on the woman\u2019s body to go through multiple rounds of IVF to achieve that idealistic philosophical vision of only using embryo selection, and no germline gene correction. I think both options should be available to families.\u201d<\/p>\n Editing embryos is morally more defensible than choosing between them, Tie argues. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix \u2013 we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.\u201d<\/p>\n I ask Tie how much gene editing will cost. \u201cI don\u2019t have a number because this will be determined by each country,\u201d she replies. \u201cEvery country has a different healthcare system.\u201d Tie is Canadian, so she and I are used to a very different healthcare system to the US. Does she feel uncomfortable that, in the country where her company is based, only the wealthy will be able to afford the incredibly powerful technology she is creating?<\/p>\n \u2018All my life, I\u2019ve been painted as a young, bright entrepreneur pushing the field of science and healthcare forward.\u2019 Photograph: Caroll Taveras\/The Guardian<\/p>\n She pauses. \u201cA lot of technologies are only available at a very high cost when they are first developed,\u201d she says eventually. \u201cJust because something is initially expensive, it doesn\u2019t mean that it shouldn\u2019t exist at all.\u201d But this isn\u2019t a new electric car or a piece of lab-grown meat. It will give the first people to use it a generational head start on everyone else. \u201cI think this is where it\u2019s very important to have the public be engaged with this conversation and why I participate in these interviews,\u201d Tie says. Once again, her commitment to transparency feels like a smokescreen.<\/p>\n It would be easy to take Tie at her word that she only wants to use gene editing to alleviate human suffering. But a little over a year ago she was using this technology to biohack pets \u2013 trying to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and even dragons that would be sold on to consumers \u2013 with her first ever gene editing startup, the Los Angeles Project. \u201cI\u2019m personally really interested in the unicorn,\u201d Tie said at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n When I bring this up, Tie suppresses a snigger. \u201cInitially, the idea was to use animal embryology to understand human embryology better, which has always been my mission. That was one of the ways in which I tried to explore this field in a compliant way.\u201d She\u2019s no longer working with the team, but wishes them all the best. \u201cI truly hope they are successful.\u201d<\/p>\n I can see why designer pets would be a good place to\u00a0start, I say \u2013 there are far fewer restrictions on experimenting on animals compared with human embryos. \u201cI\u2019m not familiar with the animal consent process because I don\u2019t work with that company right now,\u201d Tie replies. What was she doing when she was working with them? \u201cI would prefer to stay away from that topic. I don\u2019t recall too many details at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Tie\u2019s family moved to Canada from a small town near Beijing when she was four, and she grew up in Mississauga, near Toronto. Her parents \u201cworked any job they could find\u201d before starting their own business (she won\u2019t tell me in which sector). \u201cIt showed me that if you work hard and rely on your own ideas and your own drive, then you could create a different reality for yourself.\u201d As a young teenager, Tie emailed 100 professors asking for work experience in their labs. She managed to secure a placement with a professor at the University of Toronto\u2019s department of immunology, famously writing her first scientific paper<\/a> at the age of 16, in Canadian Young Scientist Journal, a publication dedicated to publishing student-driven research.<\/p>\n By this time, she\u2019d already learned that scientific success can translate into money. \u201cI used to participate in science fairs in middle school and high school where I earned thousands of dollars in college scholarships every year, and also some cash prizes. I liked that a lot.\u201d She smiles. \u201cI remember my biology teacher giving me a hard time for not showing up to class a couple of times because I had to compete in these science fairs and win them. Then I was, like, \u2018You\u2019re my biology teacher. Can you show me your latest published paper? I\u2019d love to learn more about your work.\u2019 And she didn\u2019t have any published papers. But I\u2019m, like, \u2018I\u2019ve published a paper.\u2019 I like to question systems a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n When Tie was 18, she won a Thiel Fellowship<\/a> \u2013 a then $100,000 grant funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel awarded to people aged 22 or younger who are willing to drop out of university to \u201cbuild new things\u201d \u2013 and left the University of Toronto. \u201cIt made so much sense to me to impact more people through the markets rather than wait another 10 years to get my PhD and postdoc,\u201d she says. \u201cIt empowered me to pursue things way more aggressively than I would have otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n Tie moved to San Francisco and in 2015 founded the genetic testing company Ranomics. She was named as one of Forbes magazine\u2019s 30 notable people under 30<\/a> in 2018, when she was 21. Her second company was Locke Bio, a digital health platform that allowed pharmaceutical companies to sell direct to consumers. After 10 years in California, Tie had planned to moved to Austin, Texas, and focus on the Los Angeles Project. But then she fell in love with He Jiankui.<\/p>\n Tie\u2019s ex-husband, biophysicist He Jiankui, AKA China\u2019s Dr Frankenstein. Photograph: Visual China Group via Getty Images<\/p>\n Of all the things that Tie does not want to talk about, her relationship with He is top of the list. They met through a friend in Shanghai in 2023. She interviewed him<\/a> for her YouTube channel in January 2024, asking highly scripted softball questions and telling him he is \u201cvery inspiring\u201d. Tie travelled to Beijing in January 2025 and they began a relationship. On 18 April that year, He announced on X<\/a> that they had got married. Their wedding bands<\/a> were custom-made DNA double helixes.<\/p>\n \u201cThose trained in the scientific system are too brainwashed and financially paralyzed to act with agency and think for themselves,\u201d Tie posted on 18 May 2025, underneath their wedding photographs. \u201cWhen I met He Jiankui, I realized he was different.<\/a> He was clearly a heretic. When I spoke to him in 2023 after he had served his prison sentence, he said he wanted to double down on germline gene editing. Despite being cancelled countless times, he stood his ground.\u201d She revealed<\/a> his new company, Cathy Medicine, was named after her.<\/p>\n But she was stranded in Manila, her post continued, and she had no idea why the Chinese authorities had banned her from entering the country to be with her new husband; the government was also preventing him from leaving it. (To this day, Tie doesn\u2019t know why she was banned. Perhaps the Chinese government wanted to keep her and He apart; perhaps they didn\u2019t want a second biotech entrepreneur with a high-profile social media presence in the country.)<\/p>\n In a series of now-deleted tweets, Tie called for help from \u201ccrypto people\u201d. A meme coin was launched<\/a> to raise money for He\u2019s new research lab, and He used his and Tie\u2019s faces to promote it. \u201cI only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie and continue my gene editing research,\u201d He posted to his X followers<\/a>, adding the hashtag $GENE.<\/p>\n \u201cI just want to clarify: I was not legally married,\u201d Tie tells me, her face reddening. Did they split up only because they couldn\u2019t be in the same country? Tie nods. \u201cYeah. Mmm-hmm.\u201d Her shoulders are hunched. She is squirming. \u201cDo you mind if I use the restroom?\u201d she asks. \u201cI really have to use the restroom. I\u2019ll be right back.\u201d<\/p>\n She returns five minutes later, composed once again. As much as she seems to genuinely hate being asked about He, she realises their relationship is an unavoidable part of both her personal and professional story. \u201cThere\u2019s not much I can do about it, but I still believe the work I\u2019m doing will stand on its own,\u201d she says. What did she find interesting about him? She shrugs. \u201cHe did a science experiment and went to jail.\u201d<\/p>\n In a video she made<\/a> to launch the Manhattan Project in August 2025, Tie talks about He\u2019s \u201cexperiment\u201d and says, \u201cThe biggest problem, in my opinion, was that it was done in secrecy.\u201d Does she still stand by that? \u201cYup.\u201d<\/p>\n He was editing the genes of healthy embryos that did not carry a heritable condition, I say. He made the edits in an effort to prevent the twins from perhaps contracting a disease they might be exposed to because there was an HIV positive person in their family. She pauses. \u201cI said the biggest problem was the secrecy. But, yeah, it should have started with disease-causing mutations.\u201d<\/p>\n But the edits didn\u2019t work. He created unintended, unknown changes to the genomes of the two embryos, yet chose to implant them anyway. \u201cI am not familiar enough with the exact sequences of post-gene editing and how it may or may not lead to HIV protection,\u201d Tie replies, contradicting a post she made<\/a> a few days before our conversation, naming the specific gene He had been targeting and inaccurately stating how his work \u201chelped make the twin girls immune to HIV\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest problem, in my opinion, which I still stand by,\u201d Tie repeats, \u201cwas the lack of global transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely the biggest problem is that there are now at least two human beings somewhere in the world who were created as experiments, and we have no idea what their health outcomes will be, or what the future holds for them. Surely that matters a lot more than any reputational damage caused to the field of genetic engineering through He\u2019s lack of transparency?<\/p>\n \u201cThat is certainly very serious,\u201d Tie says, enunciating every word. But she has nothing more to say about it.<\/p>\n It may be possible to make a convincing argument that serious heritable diseases linked to a single gene should be edited out of human embryos. But once the world has agreed on using genetic engineering to combat disease, where do we draw a line? Should we be happy to create babies who will have lower cholesterol and are less likely to have heart disease, or stronger bones to combat osteoporosis? Will being less smart or not as tall one day be viewed as a correctable condition?<\/p>\n \u201cPart of Origin Genomics\u2019 statement on ethics is to focus only on diseases. The idea is to focus on diseases that are well characterised, that are severe and cause suffering,\u201d Tie says.<\/p>\n But when I ask whether she will always be opposed to gene editing for enhancement, she pauses. \u201cRight now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ,\u00a0height\u00a0\u2013 thousands of genes contribute to that, we\u2019re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it.\u201d<\/p>\n If and when it does become possible, would she want to do it?<\/p>\n \u201cAs of right now, I have a very strong gut reaction that I don\u2019t want to go into that. But society is complex, and at every point in my career I want to engage with all stakeholders to make informed decisions on what\u2019s best.\u201d<\/p>\n